Scientists Discover That Fish Can Recognize Human Faces

Trending News: That Fish You Just Caught Knows Who You Are

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Long Story Short

By training amazing archerfish to recognize human faces, research teams at universities in the United Kingdom and Australia have shown that simple brains can perform highly complex tasks.

Long Story

That guppy in the counter top fish bowl is not just a pretty set of gills. Those gills have skills. In fact, scientists have just discovered fish can recognize human faces.

Now, why fish would be able to do such a thing is a very good question. Researchers haven’t figured out the answer yet but give them a break — their heads are still spinning after just learning fish can figure out faces.

Given the relatively small size of fish brains, the finding is very surprising. Throughout evolution, it has always made sense for humans to differentiate familiar faces from unfamiliar ones. It’s believed the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe of the human brain is solely dedicated to facial recognition.

Don’t expect to find the fusiform gyrus in fish, an animal with no logical evolutionary reason to develop the subtle techniques needed to tell one human face apart from another.

Researchers at two universities, one in the United Kingdom and the other in Australia, trained archerfish to spit water at familiar faces in order to get food (to eat, the amazing archerfish spits a stream of water at insects to knock them out of the air or off of branches).

The scientists trained the archerfish to recognize a specific facial image. They would then display two images at a time on a computer monitor positioned above the fish tank. When the fish spat water at the correct face, they were rewarded with a pellet of food.

Even with scientists jumbling the correct face together with as many as 44 different faces, the results were off the hook.

According to the study, the fish selected the correct face 81% of the time.

The research teams at University of Oxford and University of Queensland took it up a notch. They made the test even more challenging by standardizing the images, making them black and white, and the head shapes more similar.

Undaunted, the archerfish brilliantly hit the correct face 86% of the time.

That fish are unthinking, unfeeling creatures is a notion people have bought, hook, line and sinker. Clearly there’s more to fish than meets the eye.

Some species of fish use rocks to smash sea urchins. Channel catfish can recognize human voices calling them to offer food, and goldfish can remember the colors of food dispensing tubes even up to one year later.